HSTM Network Ireland

Please join us on April 7^th at 4:15 pm for the final event in our Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) spring seminar series:

How the pipeline ran dry: towards a critical historiography of the antibiotic pipeline  (1970 2020).

Mirza Alas Portillo (UCD School of History)

The world relies on antimicrobial drugs to treat many infections in humans, animals, and plants. Of the antimicrobial drugs, antibiotics are the most crucial class. They are a cornerstone of medical and veterinary practice, including their critical importance for treating infections and their role in more complex medical procedures. However, the growing use of antimicrobials has also had a profound impact on the microbial environment. The more antimicrobial drugs are used, the more microorganisms adapt to resist their effects. Over time, many antimicrobial treatments become ineffective. Unfortunately, the pipeline for the discovery and development of new classes of antimicrobials has dried up since the 1980s. My presentation will focus on the emergence of the empty pipeline as a concept and how applying a critical historical approach can help us reappraise standard narratives of the dry pipeline as a market failure.   

Please register here to attend digitally: https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iui54XxkRDaAcdH_aYNOtA 

Please register here to attend physically at K114: https://forms.gle/LVKwTJtsHPomvXJh6

We strongly encourage all physical participants to wear a mask in the seminar room.

You can find the full research seminar programme here: https://www.ucd.ie/chomi/research/sems/ 

‘“They attached no blame to the staff in charge”: The Role of Dublin Workhouse Officials in Preventing and Contributing to Institutional Mortality, 1872-1913’ a seminar by Shelby Zimmerman (TCD) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Lunchtime Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub.

The Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities Initiative brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, drama, health sciences, religion, cultural studies, arts, literature and languages.

Medical and health humanities seeks to provide insights into the cultural and social contexts within which diverse but interrelated concerns such as the human condition, the individual experience of illness and suffering, and the way medicine is (or was) practiced, might be understood. The Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities initiative seeks to cultivate a richer understanding of the interactions and synergies between practices and discourses of wellness, health or medicine and the arts, humanities or culture through interdisciplinary research and education. 

Description

During the Great Famine from 1845 to 1852, the Irish workhouse was associated in the public consciousness with dying and the mistreatment of the dead. By the end of the nineteenth century, the role of the workhouse shifted from poor relief to medical relief and thus became the largest and most accessible medical institution for the poor. Despite the workhouse’s newfound status as a medical institution, it was still plagued by the reputation of its Famine counterpart. Through an analysis of the North and South Dublin Unions, this paper will examine whether that stigma was warranted in post-Famine Dublin. It will look at the treatment of inmates to ascertain whether the Board of Guardians and medical officers were complicit in mortality rates. It will analyse ward management and staffing to determine whether negligence was inherent or a reflection on the medical officers. This paper will also examine how the Guardians responded to infectious disease and whether it revealed different attitudes towards different classes of inmates. Ultimately, this paper will determine if workhouse staff sought to reduce institutional mortality or contributed to the workhouse’s stigma.

Speaker Biography

Shelby Zimmerman is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin studying the medicalisation of death in the Dublin city workhouses from 1872 to 1920 centring on the role the workhouse played in Dublin’s medical landscape for the sick and dying poor. She is primarily interested in the history of medicine, institutions, the Irish Poor Law, poverty, and death. She received her BS in History and Museum Studies from Towson University in Maryland and her MPhil with Distinction from Trinity College Dublin in Modern Irish History. Shelby is an Early Career Researcher in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. She is also the co-curator of the Little Museum of Dublin’s upcoming exhibition on Victorian medicine.

Registration and Information: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/whats-on/details/event.php?eventid=158883412

The HSTM Network Ireland reading group meet online once a month to engage in discussion about a topical article in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Our next meeting will take place on:

Friday, 25th March 2022, 1:00-2:00pm, Zoom

We will be reading:

Pettit, M. (2006). “The Joy in Believing” The Cardiff Giant, Commercial Deceptions, and Styles of Observation in Gilded Age America. Isis, 97(4), 659-677.

More information on the reading group and the monthly readings can be found here.

If you would like to join the reading group, please email hstmnetworkireland@gmail.com. Details of readings and a link to the discussion group will then be forwarded to you.

Our next reading group will take place on Friday, 22nd April 2022, 1:00-2:00pm, Zoom.

Apply by 29 April 2022

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland is delighted to announce the Kirkpatrick History of Medicine Research Award 2022 is open for applications. The award, with a prize of €500, is open to all researchers in the field of the history of medicine in Ireland, as well as related social and cultural history fields.

How to apply

Applicants are asked to submit an abstract based on their research (maximum 800 words) with a copy of their CV, by Friday, 29 April 2022. Research must be unpublished and must have been undertaken in the last 3 years.  Research which has been submitted for publication will be considered, but details should be given of when and where it has been submitted, and if it has been accepted for publication.

A judging process will commence in May which will conclude with finalists presenting their 15-minute research papers to an adjudication panel on Thursday, 2 June 2022 at a public event to be held in No. 6 Kildare Street. Presentations can be made in person or virtually on the day.

DOWNLOAD APPLICATION FORM AND AWARD GUIDELINES

About the Kirkpatrick History of Medicine Research Award

The aim of the Kirkpatrick History of Medicine Research Award is to support and develop the study of the history of medicine in Ireland, and to promote the use of the library, archive and heritage item collections held by RCPI.

 For more information, contact:

Harriet Wheelock

Keeper of Collections

Tel: +353 1 669 8817

HARRIETWHEELOCK@RCPI.IE

Harriet is Keeper of Collection and manages the RCPI Heritage Centre. Contact Harriet with any questions about the Heritage Centre, its collection and to make an appointment to visit.

Please join us for the next UCD CHOMI seminar on March 24th at 4.15pm. Dr Jen Keating (UCD) will discuss Bioprospecting, global commodities and the more-than-human roots of empire in Russian Central Asia, 1880s-1916.

The environmental history of the Russian imperial rule in Central Asia has long focused on the region as a commodity frontier, noting the empire’s quest to manage water and to secure a domestic source of cotton, the ‘white gold’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet our explorations of cotton have arguably obscured numerous varied and more complex interchanges. This paper revisits the commodity frontier by exploring some unlikely global monopolies that revolved around bioprospecting – the exploitation of ‘natural’ resources for their biochemical uses in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries. Developing a fragmented history of an interconnected world, this research draws on material from the forthcoming book On arid ground: Political ecologies of empire in Russian Central Asia. It reveals how plants and animals that were valued for their medicinal role in sustaining basic livelihoods and communities were one battleground where local practices, traditions and alternative understandings of value faced off against the modernising impositions of empire. Tracing cultivation, production and circulation chains from the steppes and riverbanks of Central Asia to the laboratories of Merck and the pig farms of the United States in turn uncovers intertwined ecologies as previously unfamiliar forges of empire in the heart of Eurasia.

To attend online please register here https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zeXUYY2gSSmqCMwXG6eXbw

You can find the full research seminar programme here: https://www.ucd.ie/chomi/research/sems/

Please join us for the UCD CHOMI event on March 3rd, 16:15-17:00. Prof Catherine Cox (UCD) and Prof Hilary Marland (Warwick University) will discuss their new book Disorder Contained (CUP, March 2022) with Dr Alice Mauger (UCD).

Disorder Contained. Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840 -1900 (Cambridge University Press, March 2022). 

Disorder Contained is the first historical account of the complex  relationship between prison discipline and mental breakdown in England and Ireland.  Between 1840 and 1900 the expansion of the modern prison system coincided with increased rates of mental disorder among prisoners, exacerbated by the introduction of  regimes of isolation, deprivation and hard labour. Drawing on a range of archival and  printed sources, the authors will explore the links between different prison regimes and mental distress, examining the challenges faced by prison medical officers dealing with mental disorders within a system that stressed discipline and punishment and prisoners’ own experiences of mental illness. With  generous support from the Wellcome Trust Disorder Contained is published Open Access.

Please register here to attend digitally: https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DU1aXro0QlCmytntKr3KNA

You can find the full research seminar programme here: https://www.ucd.ie/chomi/research/sems/

Four-year Doctoral Award
A Visual History of Earth System Models from 1972 to Present
Principal Investigator: Dr Timothy Stott

Applications are sought for a fully funded four-year Provost’s PhD Project Award to begin at Trinity College Dublin in September 2022 as part of the research project A Visual History of Earth System Models from 1972 to Present led by Dr Timothy Stott (Trinity College Dublin).

The PhD research will be a case study of the visual culture of Met Eireann (The Irish Meteorological Service), with a focus on its contributions to international climate research and to Irish visual culture during this period. The award comprises the student’s full PhD tuition fees (EU or non-EU) and an annual stipend of €17,316. The deadline for applications is 4 pm on Friday 29 April 2022.

More information on the award and the application process can be found here.

The HSTM Network Ireland reading group meet online once a month to engage in discussion about a topical article in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Our next meeting will take place on:

Friday, 25th February 2022, 1:00-2:00pm, Zoom

We will be reading:

Finnegan, D. A. (2017). Finding a scientific voice: performing science, space and speech in the 19th century. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(2), 192-205.

More information on the reading group and the monthly readings can be found here.

If you would like to join the reading group, please email hstmnetworkireland@gmail.com. Details of readings and a link to the discussion group will then be forwarded to you.

Our next reading group will take place on Friday, 25th March 2022, 1:00-2:00pm, Zoom.

Please join us on Feb 10^th at 4:15pm for the next event in our Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) spring seminar series:

Dr Emily Webster (UCD School of History) will speak on:

Estuarial Vectors in the Sanitary State: Hydrology, Shellfish, and Urban Typhoid Epidemics in Ireland, 1880-1910. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, typhoid epidemics were in decline across the United  Kingdom; improved water filtration systems, drainage schemes, and household sanitation  were considered central to this transition. In the Irish towns of Belfast and Dublin, however,  typhoid rates remained stubbornly (and remarkably) elevated, despite concurrent changes  in these sanitary features. Dublin and Belfast’s typhoid epidemics happened not in spite of  these sanitary interventions, however, but because of them. Examining hydrologic data,  public health records, and sanitary infrastructure, this talk will argue that the twin epidemics  in Dublin and Belfast related to common elements of their urban ecologies and cultural  practices – and the way that imperial sanitary infrastructure disrupted them.

Please register here to attend digitally: https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hU6tlExzQDCZqWJtYDiQRw

You can find the full research seminar programme here: https://www.ucd.ie/chomi/research/sems/

The Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland plans to run a two-day in-person conference at UCD, Friday 24th – Saturday 25th June 2022, on the theme of New Perspectives on Conflict and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. 

The conference will be organised by Dr Paul Huddie (UCD Humanities Institute) with the assistance of Dr Niamh Howlin (UCD Sutherland School of Law), Dr Cathal Billings (UCD School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore), and Dr Arlene Crampsie (UCD School of Geography). 

Further information about the conference, including the Call for Papers (deadline: 31st January 2022) is available here: http://ssnci.org/annual-conference-2022/. 

Download a PDF copy of the Call for Papers.